LarkFest: A Resident’s Perspective

I was debating all week whether or not to write this piece, but after discussion with some of my neighbors and reading Brian Tromans’ post about LarkFest, I have (obviously) decided to post it.

Albany bills LarkFest as the largest single-day festival in upstate New York. It is commonly known that the police will not bother anybody for drinking in public or hold anyone accountable for the antisocial behavior that often accompanies binge drinking. Still, it is promoted as a “family friendly” event.

There is nothing about LarkFest that I want my young daughter to see. It has become nothing more than a drunk fest. Please remember: I am a professional brewer. I make my living producing and marketing beer. I am all for responsible consumption; I even support lowering the drinking age. For me to deride an event as a “drunk fest” is pretty severe!

The neighborhood in which LarkFest takes place, Center Square, is one of the most affluent and architecturally interesting in the entire city. The number of owner-occupied homes is high, as is the education level of the people living here. The number of young families is growing. By allowing LarkFest to descend to bacchanalian depths the city is alienating some of its brightest citizens.

Many neighborhood residents spent the day out on their stoops, not because we were interested in watching hordes of drunks carrying suitcases of cheap beer up and down the streets, but because we felt it necessary to protect our neighborhood. Despite this, three people were stabbed at the edge of Washington Park on State Street. I witnessed many instances of public urination, drug use and obvious under-age drinking. Somebody urinated under my stoop, against the door of my house, when I allowed my vigilance to slip for a few moments.

At one point, I saw a group of young men duck into a parking lot near the corner of Lark Street. Thinking that they were vandals, I grabbed my camera and snapped this shot. I then went to get the police who were standing around their Command Center across the street.

An officer told me he would send some people over to take care of the situation, but no police ever arrived. My neighbor, Chris Burke, told me a similar tale, “At 2:00, I walked up to the police command station to ask the officers to disperse the more than 12 people who were drinking, partying and urinating in my neighbor’s driveway and yard. There were no less than eight police offers just standing on the corner near the command station on the corner of Lark and Lancaster. When I asked for their assistance, I had to show them were Jay Street was, one half block away.”

I am not blaming the police officers for their ineffectiveness in the previous situations. I am sure they were overwhelmed; there were tens of thousands of people crammed into the neighborhood for this event. They probably had their hands full on Lark Street itself, leaving the side streets a free for all.

LarkFest was not always so disgusting an event. Chris Burke was on the Lark Street BID board a few years ago and worked to improve the festival and its image. He wrote to me:

“In the pursuit of greater numbers and sponsorships, the event has rapidly gotten out of control. From 2000 to 2005, the board of the Lark Street BID worked hard to make the event more balanced and family friendly. Prior to this, the event had gotten out of control and as a result there were increased police issues, damage to the street and neighborhoods as well as the reputation of Lark Street and the surrounding neighborhoods. The Board, at the time, focused on changing the event to drive more patrons to the merchants and promote the neighborhood as a place to come back to.”

It is obvious that more needs to be done to improve the atmosphere and security at LarkFest; the crowd needs to be kept sober and under control. The annual trashing of my neighborhood – one of the city’s nicest – is not acceptable, and trying to explain to my toddler why people are behaving so horribly is not a fun task. Far too many people coming to LarkFest do not care about the beautiful, historic neighborhood or the many interesting shops and restaurants; they are just here getting trashed, acting like trash and then driving away (which is another issue…).

One solution is to end the ubiquity of open containers; as we learned with Alive at Five, allowing people to bring their own booze leads to uncontrolled inebriation and all the fun that accompanies it. Eliminating open containers would mean people could only drink at the bars. Given the large crowds, people would be hard pressed to keep a buzz, even if they arrived drunk, and the bars would make a fortune. A win-win.

The current state of LarkFest is an abomination. It degrades the Center Square neighborhood and all of Albany. When people attend LarkFest and see the neighborhood being so badly abused they assume that it is always this way; it’s nothing more than a place to go get drunk and toss bottles around, any time of year. The festival needs to change.